Front-line employee performance in industries such as, e.g., contact centers, is facing significant challenges, frequently resulting in poor on-call experience, lower overall productivity, absenteeism and ultimately high voluntary attrition, and so on. Existing technologies and methods for remedying these challenges tend to suffer from at least two issues. First, existing technologies and methods tend to measure outcomes versus behaviors. Second, the technologies and methods tend to reduce employee engagement.
For instance, existing technologies and methods tend to measure customer satisfaction, resolve rates, handle times and other factors after a call is complete, ignoring the complex behavioral dynamics that occur during a call. Further, increasing measurement, monitoring, and management and/or adding technology used to de-skill the front-line employee role (e.g., scripting and CRM systems) reduces the autonomy of the front-line employee experience, thereby further reducing employee engagement and ultimately increasing the challenges they were intended to address.
Speech analytics technologies are known that automate the monitoring of conversational quality through the use of speech-to-text transcription or other methods to spot verbal patterns of behavior and various forms of emotion detection in order to weight the evaluation of negative behavioral patterns. The reliability of speech-to-text systems, however, suffers from inaccuracies in the transcription, as well as ambiguities in verbal communication. Most speech-to-text systems deal with these inaccuracies by aggregating results and presenting them to supervisors. Some speech analytics solutions have the ability to provide information directly to front-line employees, but generally this information is provided post-conversation.
A commonly used method of improving the employee experience involves the use of contests and incentives to reward desirable behaviors. The specific methods used are highly varied, but the application of these types of “games” is pervasive in the contact center industry. The application of these types of games generally fails to create a sustained benefit because they do not address the underlying employee experience issue and the rewards used are subject to hedonic adaptation so they lose their effectiveness over time.
In order to address the root cause of, for example, common call center operational challenges, an unfulfilled need exists for a means to both measure and influence employee behavior without degrading the front-line employee experience or reducing autonomy.